How often have you said, "I can’t wait to get to work in the morning!" This is what Ron Lindholm, owner of Cape Cod Picture Framing and Restoration, feels about his work, and it’s the whole atmosphere at his shop, where on a recent visit this writer got a grand tour and a look at some of the mysteries behind restoring a work of art.

How often have you said, “I can’t wait to get to work in the morning!” This is what Ron Lindholm, owner of Cape Cod Picture Framing and Restoration, feels about his work, and it’s the whole atmosphere at his shop, where on a recent visit this writer got a grand tour and a look at some of the mysteries behind restoring a work of art.

Operated as a frame shop in the 1950s, the business was purchased by Ron Lindholm’s father in 1969. It was originally located on West Main Street in Hyannis, where Ralph Cahoon became a favorite customer. Cahoon loved antique frames, and he’d bring them in to be cut and fit to his artworks. In the late 1970s, Cahoon and his friend Bernard Woodman collaborated on many pieces that the Lindholms framed, with Cahoon’s paintings in the center of Woodman’s famous Sailors’ Valentines.

Ron Lindholm, who now owns the business, described his late father as a “suit and tie businessman” who up and became an artisan, altering his career and then bringing other members of his family into the working fold. The younger Lindholm, who came on board in 1975, attended workshops in framing and began the meticulous work of learning painting restoration, studying with numerous conservators over the years and adding that craft to the business. Lindholm allowed as how, for him, the “artisan part came naturally,” and he worked hard to learn the business side of the operation from his father.

Lindholm’s daughter Tracy, who has worked in the company for about a decade, was skilled in many of the shop’s operations by age 14, and later attended an exchange art program in Italy, where she studied restoration methods.

The craft of restoring oil paintings and antique frames is central to the business, and entering the shop and gallery, now located behind the post office in Dennis Village, is kind of like stepping into another time dimension, one where the only computer screen seems to be the one at the sales counter.

Step into the back room, and you’re in another world. Everyone’s doing their creative thing – cleaning old varnish off an antique painting; saving tiny leftover pieces from a broken frame to fit back in like a jigsaw puzzle; brushing new gold leaf on an old frame. No one staring at a flat screen. Everyone looking intent, focused, and all indicating to this time traveler that they wouldn’t trade their work for anything in the world. The place hums with a sense of work well done … or in progress.

The process of restoring an oil painting involves painstakingly applying a new canvas backing to the old artwork, using heat, wax and a vacuum process to secure the cracking and chipping paint. Contrary to what you might think, it’s usually easier to clean an older work than a newer one. Amazingly, it takes 150 years for an oil painting to dry, and the drier it is, the less soluble it becomes, making it easier to restore.

Cleaning the painted surface is done with tiny Q-tip-like wands to remove the yellowed varnish layer, and the artisan then completes the “inpainting,” to areas that are torn or missing their old pigment. According to Tracy, who was at work cleaning a dark-looking landscape, the sometimes more monochrome sky is often the hardest portion to work on, as pigment has to be carefully matched to the old surface. No fancy chemicals here - the process employs natural materials that have been in use for many hundreds of years. Since the materials used are soluble, this makes the process reversible, and that’s important be cause, as better conservation techniques are developed in the future, they can be applied to the work as it ages. The current restoration process should keep a painting secure for a minimum of 100 years.

Frame restoration uses casts created from the existing frame to get an exact match of the pattern. A water-based clay mixed with rabbit skin glue is applied to a gesso layer, and then 22kt gold leaf is applied.

It’s brushed from what looks like a small square of gold paper right onto the clay-glue mix and then can be burnished and antiqued to give the proper look. The magical thing to this visitor was that, if you try to pick up that gold “paper” with your fingers, it crumbles to gold dust.

Restorer Becci Rainwater, who was working with tiny pieces of a damaged frame, described how a frame that’s brought in is sometimes accompanied by a “plastic baggie” of tiny broken pieces, while other times they have to start from scratch.

He noted that the choice of a frame “is part of [good] interior design,” and showed off a pneumatic cutter that creates perfect custom mats in a myriad of shapes and sizes. Does it hurt the value of a painting to have it restored? Lindholm replied that “all museums restore all [their] old paintings.” The techniques he uses are those used by museums and, he added, “If it looks good, the value is improved.”

Lindholm said that the majority of his restoration work is done on nineteenth-century oils, whether marine, landscape or portrait. He said that many baby boomers who inherited such works are now getting them restored, to pass on to the next generation. He also does a lot of work for museums such as the Cape Cod Museum of Art in Dennis, and for art dealers and historical societies.

He described the shop as the only retail establishment on Cape Cod where a customer can work directly with the people actually doing the restoration. As for developing the fine reputation his company has maintained over the past 40-plus years, he explained that reputations in this field “need to be earned.”

When he meets former employees from his business, Lindholm said, they always tell him “it was the favorite job they ever had.” He added, “It has to be one of the most exciting jobs anyone could have!